Subtitles

I confess. I am the mother of a sub-titler.

Live subtitling is really very difficult and the subtitlers only do about 10 minutes live work at a time. Not all subtitlers can do it and it takes nearly a year to train both the subtitler and their voice recognition computer, which has to learn (like a well-trained dog) to recognise their voices and pronunciation, but like the best trained dogs sometimes they play up and there have been several occasions, including on a grand state occasion when what DD said and what was placed on the screen may have sounded similar but the meaning most emphatically was not.

The other thing she dreads is interviewees who have strong regional or foreign accents. The first time she did live subtitling on national television she got a regional news bulletin and there was an interviewee with a very strong accent, using dialect words and barely moving his lips as he spoke. She had to leave his responses unsubtitled. Fortunately it was the 6.00am bulletin so it passed unnoticed.